Today’s episode topic focuses on Transforming Women Entrepreneurs (TWE) & Leveraging Millennials in the Workplace. I’ve been involved with Transforming Women Entrepreneurs for a few years now here in Atlanta, and I love the work that my guest is doing to help women business owners reach greater heights of success. My guest is also an expert in generations in the workplace and no topic is typically hotter than how companies need to think about millennial workers.

Listen to the interview, which is embedded at the bottom of this post!!

My guest is Nancy J. Lewis the founder and president of Progressive Techniques, Inc. where the theme of her organization is, “Developing a Better YOU!” Nancy has 25 years of experience in professional development, diversity and inclusion, leadership, and communication skills.

In the first few minutes of the interview, Nancy and I talked about how TWE got started as an organization. Celebrating 10 years this year, TWE was started to provide a forum for women business owners to provide them education, mentorship, support and so much more. I’ll be speaking at the March 8 event talking about how women can grow their businesses to the next level using social selling strategies.

Learn about other speakers during the interview too. If you are here in Atlanta, register for the event here http://www.twe.events/ You MUST register by March 1st due to the security constraints onsite at Coca-Cola where the event is going to be held.

Then we got into an insightful conversation about generations in the workplace, specifically the dynamics happening between millennials and boomers. We technically have 5 generations in this workspace says Nancy but the main generations are Boomers, Gen X and Millennials, which we discussed.

How do we bridge the relationships?

The biggest issue or war is between Boomers and Millennials. Gen X is often being excluded from the conversation due to their size being so much smaller.

Some key differences between Millennials and Boomers are:

Millennials have a reputation for coming into the workplace with an attitude of entitlement. Not everyone, of course. As Nancy reminds us, we should be careful about making sweeping generalizations. Certainly, these younger workers come in expecting to be promoted in a few months versus doing the job for a year or so as they develop the skills to progress when they are ready. It is also not uncommon for millennials to believe they already know it all and don’t need help. Of course, I’d say that’s probably true of every generation. I remember when I first entered the workforce. There is no doubt that I thought my way was better until I learned to listen, learn and be open to the fact that I’d not developed enough experience to “know it all”.

Boomers on the other hand can be resistant. They don’t trust these younger workers tethered to social media 24/7 who think they already know it all and resist any kind of feedback at all. What Nancy pointed out though is that Boomers created the Millennial generation and thus played a role in why their attitudes are what they are. Good point! These parents were providing positive feedback in all circumstances. And, by now, it is well documented that the Millennial generation is the first generation to get trophies just for participating. That certainly wasn’t case in my day. Winners earned the trophies. That’s life. We can’t all win and showing up is part of life. Still, Millennials find constructive feedback hard to hear.

What can be done?

It is important for Millennials to open themselves up to constructive criticism. Our experience and expertise develops over time. There is an opportunity for cross-mentoring of both Millennials and Boomers. Millennials can benefit from the experience, knowledge and social/people skills or Boomers. Boomers can benefit also by keeping an open mind about the ideas that Millennials bring to the table. That includes learning from Millennials how to leverage social media and embrace new approaches to do business.

Businesses can also adjust their onboarding process to be more customized to meet the needs of these younger workers. Setting expectations about what the job entails is important. As is putting someone in the position to resolve a particular issue if they believe they are now ready to move up if they’ve been on the job a short period of time. I loved that idea because it puts that employee into a position to practice and see that they may or may not be ready yet.

“Developing a Better YOU!” Nancy has 25 years of experience in professional development, diversity and inclusion, leadership, and communication skills. A former Dale Carnegie Instructor for thirteen years, and adjunct faculty instructor for Georgia State University, she is a seasoned professional leveraging practical skills to resolve complex workplace issues and conducts motivational keynotes.

As a facilitator and business/executive coach, Nancy has worked with many Fortune 100, Fortune 500, and government agencies. As a former Human Resources practitioner, Nancy brings the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding to her workshops. Nancy is certified in a variety of assessment tools, including DiSC, Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI), and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

Nancy has a quarterly event called Transforming Women Entrepreneurs (TWE) where she empowers, equips, and encourages women to be the very best they can be in an environment where true connections are made.

Nancy has an engaging and energizing style that creates an atmosphere where attendees are comfortable with sharing their struggles as creative ways of resolving the issues of work and life are provided.

In the early days of my sales career, I was taught to sell features and benefits. Later, Solution Selling, Consultative Selling, Precision Questions, Spin Selling and other sales methodologies like them espoused the importance of asking the right questions to understand buyer pain in order to sell your solution.

For there to be pain, a problem had to be identified. Once identified, you then draw the correlation between the buyer’s pain and how your product or service is the buyer’s cure. Taking it further, if you are doing your job well, you also have to break through the inertia of what is likely your toughest competitor – the status quo. Your prospect may have identified a problem that is causing them business pain, but is the pain acute or chronic? In other words, is the pain something that they’ve lived with long enough that they will continue to allow it to go on, OR has the problem become so acutely painful that they absolutely must make a change?

These last few days, I’ve been having conversations with Judy Mod and Matt Rosenhaft, Principals at Social Gastronomy. They work with technology companies to overcome what they call the “buyer adoption” problem. Turns out that companies are getting in their own way. They very often hinder the buying process rather than further it along. In an April 2014 blog post, Chuck Carey had this to say, “Buyers measure success based on how well you resolved their problem, not how well you met their expectations.”

When it comes to problems, there are two things happening.

1. Your prospect thinks they have identified a business problem that they need to fix. Is it the right problem? Are you sure?

Doubtful that your buyer is sure. According to Matt and Judy, the challenge sellers (and marketers) face is that it is darn difficult for internal teams to all agree on what the acute problem is much less agree on how to fix it. As with so many things in life, most folks simply focus their attention on symptoms without delving deeper into the root cause of the pain the organization suffers from.

I think of countless sales situations I’ve found myself in where the buyer tells me the problem is X, and after I ask more questions, I find out that on surface X looks to be correct, but the deeper digging uncovered something more revealing.

In one sales meeting, the buyer tells me that the “problem” is that their salespeople are having trouble getting access to decision makers. They reached out to me thinking that social selling was the way to go. Maybe. During the conversation, the buyer assured me that once a salesperson secured the meeting, they “always closed the deal”. When I hear that, I’m suspicious. I don’t care how good a salesperson you are, you never win them all. Curious, I ask them to tell me the percentage ratio of meetings to closed deals. Guess what. They can’t. Why? Because by their own admission, their salespeople are notoriously bad about entering sales opportunities and communication into their CRM system. They just don’t do it most of the time. If there is very little data regarding the sales pipeline and funnel progression stages, how do they know salespeople always close the deal? The discussion went on from there but you get the idea. They were not close to being clear about the real problem.

2. Do you know what problem your solution solves and can you clearly articulate that message?

Given how many sales presentations I’ve listened to, I’d say that the answer is no. If you, as the salesperson, don’t know what problem your solution solves, do you really think your prospect can simply connect the random dots and figure it out on their own? When it comes to marketing and selling your products and services, your potential customers DO NOT CARE about the process of how you get things done. Nor do they really care about the technical details. Sure, if it is a technology solution the IT guys might, but that comes later. In the initial stages of determining what product or service to purchase, your prospect cares about one thing – finding the right solution to solve their problem.

Forget the Features

I cannot say this enough. Though I know this is sooooo difficult for sellers to hear. They’ve been brainwashed to think that buyers make decisions based on features. They don’t.

In January, I wrote a blog post about a little book called Stop Doing That! 21 Activities Critical to Business Success that YOU Shouldn’t Do written by my colleague Essie Escobedo of Office Angels. The message is powerful. If you want to succeed as a business owner, you have to transform your thinking and stop trying to do everything yourself. The book prompted me to start a new podcast series called Entrepreneur Mastery. Naturally, I wanted Essie as my first guest.

Let me tell you about Essie…

A veteran small business owner with more than 20 years’ experience starting and running two success businesses, Essie knew what she needed when she was in the corner office – stellar accountants, administrators and project managers who were flexible enough to fit in where they were needed and move on to the next challenge. She also realizes that the employee-like performance she wanted had to come at a nonemployee-like price. Essie launched Office Angelsto bring the skills and talents of a world class support staff to even the smallest business owner.

Here are a few of the things you’ll learn about when you listen to my conversation with Essie:

1. Why she wrote the book in the first place.

2. Why it is difficult for business owners to let go and feel they have to do it all themselves.

3. The #1 thing that Essie believes business owner MUST understand about their business to be successful.

4. What you lose when you insist on doing everyone alone.

5. How the concept of Office Angels came together.

6. The difference between Office Angels and a traditional staffing agency.

As an avid reader and learning junkie, I can’t think of a nicer gift than to receive a book. Just such a gift showed up in my mailbox during the holidays, and I was delighted to see that it had been written by my colleague Essie Escobedo, the Chief Executive Angel at Office Angels. The book is called STOP doing that! 21 Activities Critical to Business Success That YOU Shouldn’t Do.

At fewer than 100 pages, Essie words of wisdom smacked me right upside the head yesterday morning. I didn’t have so much of an “ah ha” moment, as I did an “oh $%*#” moment when I realized that out of 21 activities, I’m guilty of doing 15 of them. Ouch!

Right then, I decided that I needed to change some things. How else can I expect my business to grow to the level I’ve been envisioning? But it is a funny thing about change. We commonly think that change of any significance takes a long time to make happen. I’ve come to agree with Tony Robbins that this is a myth. Start feeling enough pain and I guarantee you’ll change anything – instantly.

Entrepreneurs largely think that they have to do it all themselves and often use lack of money to fund the necessary resources as the excuse. Been there. I’ve boot-strapped it like everyone else, but the problem is that there will NEVER be enough free resources available to help you get to where you need to go. You must invest in yourself and your business and guess what…you must delegate the things that you don’t do well and that pull you away from your core strengths. The fact is that you’ve got to spend money to get the professional assistance you need in order to create a thriving business.

While I’m not going to share the entire list – because I want you to buy Essie’s book – I want to use activity #8 Creating Your Own Business Plan, as an example of what I resolved to change immediately. Yes, I have a sales and marketing plan, which probably puts me farther ahead than many small business owners, but an honest-to-goodness business plan that looks at all aspects of my business and considers today and the future of my company? Uh, a little lacking there. And I know exactly why. Not only am I too close to the situation and think all of my ideas and strategies are brilliant – come on, what business owner doesn’t? – but I’m not the most skilled at it. I am fully aware of the importance of having a clear and detailed roadmap but with so many opinions out there about how to do planning well, I become overwhelmed before I even begin. Convenient excuse, isn’t it?

If you truly want to succeed, you must hire help! It really is that simple. I know. I did it yesterday when I hired a business advisor to help me get that plan in order.

Now it’s your turn. Read Essie’s book. Determine what help you need. Commit to hiring someone immediately, do it, then come back to my blog and share your success story.

By the way, I’ll be interviewing Essie about her book in an upcoming podcast on Entrepreneurial Mastery. I know you’ll want to tune in!

I often seem to have far too many great ideas and projects in various stages of completion. That unfortunately leads me to feel overwhelmed and lacking focus. Does this happen to you?

Though I used to believe that multi-tasking was a good thing, I’ve come to realize that thinking we can multi-task and still be effective is far from the truth. The real key to achieving our goals is focus and that can only happen if you chunk your projects or your objectives down into bite-sized pieces.

Why You ProcrastinateProcrastination for most of us becomes a challenge, because when the task seems to big it’s easy to put off getting it done. In Brian Tracy’s book – Eat that Frog – he talks about taking on the toughest things first when kicking off the day. The idea is that it’s better to get the hardest things done first before everything else, because usually the toughest things are the most important.

I’ve put into practice this idea of doing the hardest things first – the things that usually take the longest, but boy of boy is the feeling of getting it done worth it!

Start With One StepWired as we are, you will definitely find it much easier to break down your projects into manageable steps and then take them on one at a time. Work through each step to the very end. Finish it before moving to the next. Before you know it – you’re done!

Forget Perfect – Just Get GoingThis can sometimes be a killer for me. I’m so worried about getting it perfect that I don’t get started at all. Get going – that’s the key. Once you start moving forward the energy and momentum of the project takes on a life of it’s own. You’ll begin to feel excited and motivated about what you’ve accomplished.

So as you are winding down 2008 and thinking about what you want to accomplish in the coming year…make your list, then break each objective into bite sized chunks and then get moving!

Hard to believe isn’t it? So much work goes into networking, securing appointments, making the presentations, writing the proposals and then somehow you never actually get around to asking for the sale. Even if you lack confidence or experience, closing doesn’t have to be painful or bewildering.

Here are a few basic points to follow:

Close from the beginning – not to be confused with the old fashioned hard sell; cutthroat approaches rarely works anymore. You are better off letting your prospect know exactly what you’re selling and how you believe what you offer can benefit their business. Sell value, integrity and, above all, relationship. Using this type of approach paves the way for a smoother close.

Learn to recognize the buying signals. There are lots of ways that people let us know when they are ready to buy, but you need to pay attention. For example, they might indicate their readiness by asking you questions about the solution or the buying process. Listen for the clues: “How long would delivery take?” “When could we expect the work to be finished?” or “Is an upgrade available?”

Don’t respond to questions with a “yes” or “no”. Answer the prospect’s questions with questions of your own. Carefully chosen, these return questions can help lead to a sale. For example, instead of answering the question: “Does this model come in silver?” with merely an affirmative, you could say: “Would you like it in silver?”

Suggest specific terms. Rather than asking whether your prospect wants to buy, suggest a specific buying scenario and then ask if your customer agrees to it. For example, “We can start the coaching project on Tuesday for a retainer of $5,000. Would you like us to do that?” If your prospect is uncomfortable with any of the specifics, they will certainly let you know. Make sure you know enough about their needs before undertaking this approach. Otherwise, you risk sounding pushy.

Well, there you have it. The Top 10 Sales Blunders and How You Can Avoid Them. I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey as much as I have. My passion is in helping YOU to attract more clients and close more sales, more often.

There are four distinct phases to the buying cycle that you need to be aware of. Learn to recognize these phases when talking to your prospective clients and save yourself time and heartburn down the road.

Phase I: Need – your prospect is aware that some sort of change is required either in themselves or in the company they work for; they may feel uneasy or possibly under pressure to quickly find a solution to the problem.

Phase 2: Learn – knowing there is a need; your prospect sets out to research products or services that may potentially fix their problem. They are asking themselves who offers the best solution, so they will compare the offerings of several different companies during this phase.

Phase 3: Buy – fear about choosing the right solution is weighing heavily on your prospect’s mind at this point. They’re thinking: “What if I make a mistake? What if the sales person oversold the capability of their product or service? What if I commit to this approach and it doesn’t solve the problem like I think it will? Will my career be in jeopardy if I make a mistake with this decision? Will we be able to agree to terms?”

Phase 4: Value – in the value phase, your prospect is considering whether or not they will see the results that they’ve been promised. They might be wondering if they’ll really end up satisfied with the solution. They are weighing the value of the solution against the problem they need to solve and evaluating the risks involved with potentially making the wrong decision.

Make sure you understand what phase of the buying process your customer is currently in. This will help you be more aware of the issues at stake and make you better prepared for selling your solution.

In most things in life, a one-size-fits-all approach is rarely effective. This is especially true with selling. Approaching the sale the same way with every person just doesn’t work. Sure, you might be marginally successful with a few who have a similar style to yours, but you’ll be losing the chance to sell your product or service to about 75% of those others who are very different from you.

As you meet prospective clients observe their pace – do they walk fast, talk fast and ask rapid fire questions? If the answer is “yes”, your best bet is to dispense with the pleasantries, cut to the chase, tell them what results they’ll get when they work with you, and then get out of their office. Others you’ll encounter will want detailed explanations and facts and figures to back up what you are offering, to be reassured that the buying risk they are taking won’t leave them twisting in the wind.

DIFFERENT PERSONALITIES COMMUNICATE DIFFERENTLY

To get started you’ve got to know yourself first. Assess your current sales strengths and capabilities. Get to know what you’re really good at and definitely get to know where you have challenges in the sales process. What comes next is learning about the personality styles of other people and what works for them in the sales process.

An important tool that you can use is the Everything DiSC Sales Profile to help you understand exactly where you excel and where you will need help. And more importantly, you will learn exactly what you need to do adapt your communication and pace in order to better connect with your prospect. When you understand how to meet people where they are and give them what they need during their buying process, your sales success will definitely soar!

Once you’ve secured the appointment, the real work begins. You must decide what your objective for your meeting – whether it’s face to face or on the telephone – actually is and then create questions that lead the conversation to the destination you have in mind. I cannot stress strongly enough how important it is for you to PLAN for your meeting BEFORE walking in the door or calling them on the phone. Shooting from hip gets your nowhere, so if you are serious about closing sales, you need to do your homework.

DETERMINE YOUR OBJECTIVE

The first thing you need to do is determine your top 1-2 objectives for your sales meeting. It might be to generate enough interest to secure another meeting or get the purchasing commitment right on the spot. Whatever your goal, you must be very clear what outcome you expect to achieve when you sit down to meet.
KEEP THE MEETING FOCUSED

To keep your meeting on point and focused on your objectives, I recommend that you sit down and plan at least 10 questions that you will ask during that meeting. Think about how you can create them in two ways, just in case the answer to your first question falls flat. For example, if you ask: “How was your most recent quarterly sales performance?” and they say “fine”, you need to be prepared to ask the question another way in order to get more information.

Frame your questions using “how” and “what”. Open ended questions tend to elicit answers that give you more than a simple “yes” or “no”. Preparing questions ahead of time keeps your conversation focused and flowing, and you are far more likely to listen to the answers and learn what you need, when you have considered your questions in advance.

Let’s say you’ve been consistent and persistent and you finally get your prospect on the line. Do you know what you plan to say?

The reality is that 65% of all sales are lost in that opening telephone call. And frankly, this could apply to how you leave voicemails also.

If you think back to my very first blunder, I talked about how most people selling a product or service tend to default to a feature dump. That usually happens in telephone calls too. This is NOT the time to “sell” your prospect something or to be talking about yourself.

Here are the elements to think about before making your call:

Introduction – A great call starts with this foundation! Clearly introduce yourself – first name, last name, your company – be confident and above all, be articulate. You don’t get a second chance to make that critical first impression, so take it seriously. If you are leaving a phone mail ALWAYS leave your telephone number at the beginning and end of your message.

Grab their interest – determine what might capture their interest long enough to spend a few minutes talking with you. What economic trends might be affecting their industry? What challenges do your current clients mention to you that might also apply to your prospect? Take the pressure off yourself and them by getting them engaged in a conversation with you.

Ask for time – Once you’ve captured their attention, ask them for a few more minutes. Then stick to the agreement. If you asked for 10 minutes, end the call in that time or less. Demonstrate that you are a professional who respects their busy schedule. Your goal is to secure a future appointment, so don’t try to sell them in the first call. Get them interested and they’ll be far more likely to want to meet with you.

Don’t just roll into your sales pitch. Take the time to put a framework in place for building a relationship with your prospect. Using this approach, you capture their interest in a way that lets them know you are a professional, that you understand their world. And you’ve gotten them to talk about issues that you know your product or service can help them solve. Now, that’s a great first step!

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